What started as a blog looking at Booker Prize Shortlisted novels since 1969, has morphed into a search for the best writing from the whole planet. Books listed for Awards of various descriptions a forte but not a prerequisite.

All the links to affiliates, ads etc on my blog generate income. I donate 100% of ALL income to various charities. So buy books using links on my blog - they cost you no more - but the affiliate fee I receive is donated to various charities (to see which charities visit http://messcharityrun.blogspot.com.au/)

Monday, 29 August 2016

Truth rises up from
the depths and alters the orderly surface of things.

Last year I planned a full six week holiday/visit to Central
America, taking in places such as Mexico and Guatemala and once my work
situation changed and the bill came in, the passports were put back on
mothballs and a local holiday to Kangaroo Island replaced my ambitious plans.
Somehow that planning must have left a seed in my subconscious as I have been
reading books from the region all year, twenty-one of the seventy-five posts I
have made this year have been from
Central or south America, 28% shows a distinct leaning!!! I still have fifteen
or twenty unread books on my “to be read” piles from the region so more will be
forthcoming before the end of the year I am sure, there’s even a chance I’ll
manage to fit one or two more in before the end of “Women In Translation Month”
too.

Back to Chile for my latest read, a work nowhere near as
experimental or as challenging as Diamela Eltit’s “Custody of the Eyes” (translated by Helen Lane & Ronald
Christ), more your very readable, approachable style like the last couple of
works I have read from Mexico. As with “Ten Women” by Marcela Serrano
(translated by Beth Fowler) which was told in ten different voices, or “Umami”
by Laia Jufresa (translated by Sophie Hughes) with five narrators, “The Rest Is
Silence” is narrated in three difference voices.

The novel opens with the innocent child voice of Tommy, who
has been excluded from the other children’s games and is hiding under a table
at a Wedding, listening, and in fact recording, adult conversations. By doing
so Tommy accidentally learns that his mother did not die from an aneurysm, but
rather committed suicide:

If Mama killed herself, it’s
because she didn’t love me. I hold my breath and count: Ten, nine, eight, seven…I’m
sure I can go back, back to before I hid under this table…six, five…the
elephant would say anything to impress her friends…four, three, two…My head is
spinning and I feel a thousand stabs in my belly, as if a propeller were
turning round and round inside my guts. I can’t stand it anymore. I make a dash
for it. I slip and fall. I bang my knees and my hands.

I’ve come to the very end of the
garden, where it plunges down into the sea. The light in the sky is white. My
cousins are playing ball at the top of the hill, the highest point in the
garden. I sit down on the grass. I hug my knees and bury my head in my lap. I
stink. I don’t know exactly when my guts exploded. Now I’m really in trouble.

Sometimes I know what it feels
like to be unhappy, to wait for night-time so I can hide under the sheets,
close my eyes, and escape forever to Kájef’s barge. Is that how Mama felt?

We then immediately move to the female voice of Alma,
Tommy’s step mother, slowly the history of this family comes into focus.
Finally the voice of Juan, Tommy’s father and Alma’s husband, takes the stage,
and the grief over his first wife’s, Solidad’s, death, his young child’s heart
condition and his relationship with his current wife become the dominant
themes.

This is a story of a fractured family, with one character
obsessed by his child’s failing heart, another about “love” and her
relationship with her mother, her husband and her own child and step child and
the other character wondering why everybody is so uneasy and where is his mum?

The innocent, but honest, voice of the child Tommy not only
acts as a nice counterbalance to the two adult voices, who do not communicate
directly with each other, but it also raises the tension in the novel. With
Tommy talking to his imaginary friend or the maid Yerfa, or reviewing his
illicit tape recordings, you know that the crescendo is slowly building, an
explosive conclusion is a foregone conclusion.

The day’s first light is blue.
The gate is open, and the outside light is on. IT wasn’t a dream. Alma came
home with another man. I want to edit out that whole scene, like she does with her
movies. Erase it from my memory. But when something new and important gets into
my head, there’s no way to get it out of there. No matter how hard I try to
forget, there are little monsters who keep reminding me it’s still there. Not
long ago, I explained it to Alma and she told me that the little monsters are
called your conscience. I asked her if they ever go away and she said they don’t,
but we learn to live and just pretend we don’t see them. I wanted to know why I
can’t do that and Alma told me that maybe I was one of those very few people
who, instead of closing their eyes, confront the monsters and fight against
them until they defeat them. That’s why I’ve been thinking that if I can
discover ten things about Mama, everything will become clear. Why ten? Because
God gave us ten commandments to live by, because we have ten fingers, because
ten billion kilometres are one light year, because Yerfa says I should count to
ten before I say or do anything that I might later regret.

As each voice reveals a little more of their history, and their
experiences, the layers are slowly peeled back and your pre-conceived ideas are
put to the test, they are simply illusions, the truth of this family is more
complex than you initially thought. As the unsaid, the “silences” referred to
in the title, accumulate, you can see the rift that is slowly breaking this
family apart.

There are a few events that happen, especially how Tommy
discovers his roots, which, to me, are too coincidental, or contrived, however
these don’t detract from the overall theme, tension, or plot of the work.

As the opening quote, I chose here, says…”truth rises up
from the depths and alters the orderly surface of things”…here we have three
truths conveyed by three different voices, their individual truths different to
the truths of the others. Confusing? It is not so when you read the book.

A pleasant read, not a challenging work by any means, and
one that addresses the themes of family bonds, love, generational influence,
addressing the truth and grief. Another fine addition to Women In Translation
Month, one for people who are yet to dabble in such books to possibly try as a
starter.

By the way Kangaroo Island is stunning, if you want remote,
pristine, forests, walks along beaches, then this is a place to visit. It
wasn’t my dream Central American trip, that can wait, I’ve been there through
my reading choices for months now.